3 Weird Reasons Why Your Instagram Following Isn’t Growing

There’s over 700 million active users now on Instagram – imagine if you were able to harness the power of Instagram and have your business, blog or message seen by over 700 million people for free, while building relationships with them and ultimately having them wanting to buy from you?

Instagram is the only place I have seen the fastest, easiest and most fun growth for my business. It has taken my business from a failing startup to a fully-functional and booming online company. Are you on Instagram yet? If not, you’re missing out on a huge potential to be seen either as an influencer or as an authority in your niche.

So why are people not seeing authentic growth with their Instagram accounts?

Reason #1: They’re buying fake followers

The biggest reason why people’s engagement is low, is because they are buying fake followers. Now, even if you had authentic followers on there to begin with and you decided to buy a few fake followers, this can be completely detrimental to your Instagram account and engagement overall.

This is because fake followers are just that. Fake. They are not real people and won’t engage with your posts or ever buy from you.

However, that’s not all. When you make a post, Instagram does not show that post to all of your followers. It tests the post by showing it to an initial selected pool of people. Depending on the level of engagement and interest that post receives, Instagram’s algorithm will then decide to show it to more, or less, people. If your post was shown to a selected group of initial people, some of which were made up by fake followers, those followers will not engage with your post. Therefore, Instagram will deem this content not interesting and will not show it to any of the rest of your followers.

Over time, because less people are engaging with your content, this can ruin your algorithm, meaning that your content will show up in less people’s feeds overall, even if they were people who were interested in your content and chose to follow you in the first place.

Reason #2: You post sporadically

Much like the reason I mentioned above, posting irregularly, can mean that your followers are not able to engage with you regularly. This in turn signals to Instagram’s algorithm that those followers are less interested in your content and your posts will start to appear lower down in their newsfeeds or eventually not at all.

Also, people will start to forget who you are and why they even followed you in the first place, leading to lots of unfollows.

The appeal of these systems and bots that take the hard work out of growing your account is that you can see instant results. However, this is not authentic growth. A system can never replace the authenticity of a real human (you and your brand) interacting with your fans and potential followers.

Moreover, Instagram is shutting down these bots and systems one by one. Using automated systems is against Instagram’s terms of use so you could also put your account as risk too.

There are so many other reasons that your Instagram account following isn’t growing.

I go into more detail about all of this, what to avoid and best practices for when it comes to growing your account on my Free Online Instagram Masterclass. I’ve personally used all of these strategies and secrets to grow my own account to over 100k and you can do the same too!

These tips are really great! I started my Instagram about a year and a half ago and it’s been really great for me. I try to take a few hours out of my day to interact with my followers and such and it’s a great way to grow. Thanks for sharing this post! xo

I don’t understand why people buy followers. It is so obvious when they do, someone with 10k followers and only a few likes, and possibly no comments, definitely raises a few flags! I have enrolled in your workshop, can’t wait to learn all the secrets!

I remember one of my first ever photo posted got reposted by a big account…suddently I was having over 500 followers over a night. But then it got dead silence!?? But it was fun having over 25k liking my photo!